we should have something like this for next vec. I think its a must today.Everyone is doin it. The indexing demon should be turned on optionally.When done indexing,the daemon is not eating too much memory.

as for the best gui frontend to these engines, i would say its deskbar-applet. Its superb to anything else avaiable.I'd say this is my favorite thing in gnome. I wonder if its possible to compile without much gnome deps. I stumbled on gnome-doc-utis at configure..http://raphael.slinckx.net/deskbar/

Given hdd are becoming bigger and bigger, and we (most of us) are not organizing our files correctly, this programs seem to be useful, but beagle is veeery resource demanding, and I wouldn't install it by default.

some of those proggys in the repos would be good, but I don't know if that need is spread enough to install it with vectorlinux-base.

<opinion>GUI's are tricky, so maybe not working in one or other WM/DE, so it would be good to choose a search tool that provides a console interface (therefore we could adapt it to XFCE by making an applet)</opinion>

<hack>After trying some programs for that end and none convincing me I've been using a combination of locate/ratmenu and perl code that allows me to find files indexed by extension, and being able to search for regexps (perl interpolation is nice sometimes). My script remembers which was the last extension you asked for, so pressing enter repeats the same search you did before, and it shows you all files matching your search in a ratmenu (it knows with what app open different extensions). Only bad point is it rebuilds the database on demand, and it can't search inside files.

I actually found google desktop to be very light when indexing files. It indexed very slowly, only a file here and there, and only when I wasn't doing something on the computer. There was no noticeable slowdown.

I believe strigi is going to be the search engine behind KDE4. In the SOHO, we could just use that (that is if KDE4 ever comes out) because it will supposedly be integrated throughout the whole desktop.

another non source serarch tool is google desktop. It has no deps,BUT it is not very light while its indexing files.

Can we actually use that (License) ?

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we should have something like this for next vec. I think its a must today.Everyone is doin it.

That is not a valid reason. "Everybody" is using HAL. "Everybody" is using gnome.

Why would we want to have this? What can these search tools do that intelligent use of the already available tools ( locate, find, whereis ) can't?

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we (most of us) are not organizing our files correctly

Right, the problem of not being able to find files is often not because they were put in a weird place by the system, but because they were misplaced by the user. Using a directory structure that makes sense and consequently putting files where they belong will help avoiding the need to search.

Hy,I do not like the idea of having Mrs. Google sniffing in my files and sending back infos to big mom. Even if they claim to do it for my own best, yessir!I do not know Beagle , but if you need toooooooo much of the Gnome stuff I would not like this also.

What about slocate?

If somehow a and simple GUI for it would grow out of a magic bean I would see it as an option.

i thought it was a nice addition to accesories.. and picking the best one would be good... remember that they are not going to run in vec's memory by default,so its up to the user to use them or not.

I personally think that such a tool is a MUST for the modern desktop computer user.

it is not a problem to include google-desktop in a distro. Yes it is not open source, but i dont think google would mind, just as opera doesnt mind. Google would welcome that, as it does support the open source comunity. already many distributions are shipping with google applications by default.

the problem is wheter it would be a good choice from the rest.beagle is out of the question.google-desktop seems like a good alternative with no deps and can search internet as welltracker seems a bit faster and lighter, but there is no gui frontend to use it with ,when you dont have gnomestrigi is for kde4, so its up for the next soho,i guess..

I do not like the idea of having Mrs. Google sniffing in my files and sending back infos to big mom.

Agreed!Personally I'm opposed to such a tool. At least having it included by default. I like having control and the right to decide what is in my machines. I have no problem with such tools being available if a user wants them, as I'm sure they would be valuable to someone, but not me. I think it would be much like computers that come preloaded with crap ware that you have to remove. There's already a thread on that topic so I'll let this one go.

another non source serarch tool is google desktop. It has no deps,BUT it is not very light while its indexing files.

Can we actually use that (License) ?

Quote

we should have something like this for next vec. I think its a must today.Everyone is doin it.

That is not a valid reason. "Everybody" is using HAL. "Everybody" is using gnome.

I have to totally agree with this statement The_Headacher is saying. That is not a valid point in my opinion neither.Why do everything as others do?

Why would we want to have this? What can these search tools do that intelligent use of the already available tools ( locate, find, whereis ) can't?

Quote

we (most of us) are not organizing our files correctly

Right, the problem of not being able to find files is often not because they were put in a weird place by the system, but because they were misplaced by the user. Using a directory structure that makes sense and consequently putting files where they belong will help avoiding the need to search.

I agree here also, it's the user who is in charge on where she/he is putting his/her own files. Not an app is going to decide this behavior. I have a 60GB drive with a lot of smaller files as well but since I keep the directories and its contents structurized I find what I need without needing to search too deep.And locate does the trick as well.

i thought it was a nice addition to accesories.. and picking the best one would be good... remember that they are not going to run in vec's memory by default,so its up to the user to use them or not.

I'm not sure about this. I don't use any of these indexing tools, but I don't think its just a matter of selecting the apps in the "accessories" menu. These apps need to have an indexing daemon running all the time (including at boot up, and one the things that makes VL's boot time so fast is that it carefully selects only necessary things to run at startup. So this is one more thing to slow the boot-up).

Quote from: blurymind

I personally think that such a tool is a MUST for the modern desktop computer user.

On Windows, I used to leave my files strewn all over the system. My fault. On *Nix systems, there is not a lot of places your files can go to, you are confined to your home directory and removable media. As The Headacher mentioned, a good organization of your files in directories solves this "problem".

Quote from: blurymind

it is not a problem to include google-desktop in a distro. Yes it is not open source, but i dont think google would mind, just as opera doesnt mind. Google would welcome that, as it does support the open source comunity. already many distributions are shipping with google applications by default.

I think Vector has an agreement with Opera. The same thing would probably have to be done with Google for this.

Quote from: blurymind

the problem is wheter it would be a good choice from the rest.beagle is out of the question.google-desktop seems like a good alternative with no deps and can search internet as welltracker seems a bit faster and lighter, but there is no gui frontend to use it with ,when you dont have gnomestrigi is for kde4, so its up for the next soho,i guess..

IMHO, this shouldn't be installed by default. Maybe it could be an option in the package extras of the installer that the user could select, or heck, just have it in the repos and slapt-get it when/if needed.

I would like to see a tool in the repo, but that's it. I certainly don't want it loaded by default, and I don't think it's justified to have it take up space in the ISO (regardless of actual package size). Having numerous options in the repo would be a great benefit - basically a click away and with options to choose from.

Personally I don't know if I would use a GUI search tool (maybe I don't have enough files!). I get by with the command line tools "find" and "locate". locate is incredibly fast (and you can setup the "updatedb" database updater to run as a daily cron job if you wish).

For instance to show all .jpg files in my home directory and sort them:$locate *.jpg | grep "/home/larry" | sort

-no daemon necessary and works in less than a second! I'm sure most of us here know these tools and use them. They suffice and seem to me would be much faster and less obtrusive than any GUI tool..just MHO though...

If we do decide to include such an app I say we choose the fastest and least resource intensive one possible and it would be my opinion it should just be a package in the repository and not provided on the ISO.

Logged

"As people become more intelligent they care less for preachers and more for teachers". Robert G. Ingersoll

it will use find or locate until you install another backend.Supported backends are find, (s)locate, doodle, tracker, beagle, strigi and pinot.tlz package is 28.9kb

Whowwwwwwwwwwww that is exactly what I have meant with a GUI for locate or slocate. For me this would already cover 90%. I use under Windoze an commercial product (X1), which finds everything Where can I have it For me it is the smarter approach to have a search engine instead of building up a file structur. When it comes to the point that I have to search for content it does not help very much if I have filed everthing in a structure 6 directories deep.

For me it is the smarter approach to have a search engine instead of building up a file structure. When it comes to the point that I have to search for content it does not help very much if I have filed everthing in a structure 6 directories deep.

So it actually makes sense to make a mess out of your files / directories ?

When you build a proper directory structure you hardly ever have to search because it's all where it's supposed to be. For me, keeping my files organized is important to do whatever I want effectively.

If I have to search for something on my computer (rarely happens) locate works fine. I'm not going to browse directories on my system looking for this one file.

To prevent having to browse too deep to open a file, I use symlinks to my most used dirs in ~/. For instance, I have a link called ~/muziek which links to /mnt/produktie/muziek (which is where I store my music projects, samples, modules etc), and ~/mp3 links to /mnt/shared/mp3.